But perhaps that’s because I harbor residual resentment toward the New York Times Book Review (the periodical he edits), which gave favorable notices to each of my first nine books (written as a liberal) and completely ignored the lasttwo (written as a mildly center-right conservative) as if I had suddenly had a lobotomy. You be the judge.

I also might have been peeved because, unlike Tanenhaus (he’s a decade younger than I am), I actually participated in the civil rights movement, going down South and so forth and then took the horrifying step of voting for George W. Bush.

But it’s deeper than that. I think Tanenhaus is full of it and reactionary. A lot of what he writes is based on projection, a kind of “wish” that the Republican Party would be racist or a white people’s party when it is the other way around.

(I wonder if Tanenhaus remembers not too long ago when the late Andrew Breitbart offered one hundred thousand dollars for anyone with evidence that someone at the Tea Party demonstration in DC on the day that ObamaCare passed in 2010 had uttered the n-word — as alleged by John Lewis and others — and not a soul came forward for that hunk of change.)

Indeed if the GOP is branded forever as the “party of white people,” it will be folks like Tanenhaus who are responsible, not the Republicans themselves. And our country will be much the worse for it. It might even be a disaster.

As I imagine Tananenhaus realizes, others of us think it is the Democratic Party that is the party of racism, dependent as it is on the need for America to be perceived as a racist society in order for it to succeed.

The new mantra the left uses to alienate minorities from the GOP and distract them from what a God-awful disaster Democrat policies have been for them is to claim that Republicans are the party of White People (therefore, you don’t belong and will never belong):